Conventionally, there has been known a route guiding apparatus that when a vehicle reaches a guidance point set at a predetermined position located before a guidance intersection during travel along a route, provides a guidance about the intersection by, for example, outputting at least one of a voice and an image showing “00 meters to the intersection”, and displays the distance to the guidance intersection and, after that, reduces the displayed distance as the vehicle travels. As such a route guiding apparatus, patent reference 1 discloses a route guiding apparatus that can change a point at which the route guiding apparatus will provide a guidance showing that the vehicle approaches an intersection at which the vehicle should make a right or left turn according to the width of the intersecting road.
This route guiding apparatus includes a number-of-lanes storage unit for recording the number of lanes of each road into a map information recording unit for recording map information thereinto, and a route guidance control unit reads lane information at the same time when the route guidance control unit reads map information and detects the width of the intersecting road. A guidance position changing unit then changes the point at which the route guiding apparatus will provide a route guidance on the basis of the information about this width of the road, i.e. changes the displayed distance to the intersection concerned, and instructs an audio control unit to provide a voice guidance when the vehicle reaches the distance. According to this instruction, the audio control unit provides a route guidance via voice to notify the driver that the vehicle has been approaching the intersection.    [Patent Reference 1] JP,6-52493,A
The above-mentioned conventional route guiding apparatus that displays the distance to the guidance intersection calculates the distance displayed thereby by referring to the distance from the guidance point to the link endpoint acquired from a map database. The distance from the guidance point to the link end point is equal to the distance from the guidance point to the center of the intersection. Therefore, when the vehicle reaches the guidance intersection, in order to set the displayed distance to zero the conventional route guiding apparatus subtracts a predetermined value (e.g. 25 m or 15 m depending on the conventional route guiding apparatus) from the calculated distance uniformly to acquire the distance to be provided for the user.
A problem with the conventional route guiding apparatus is therefore that there is a case in which before the vehicle reaches a small-scale guidance intersection, the conventional route guiding apparatus sets the displayed distance to zero, whereas even after the vehicle has entered a large-scale guidance intersection, the conventional route guiding apparatus does not set the displayed distance to zero, and the user makes a mistake in the judgment of whether or not the intersection is a guidance one.
The present invention is made in order to meet the above-mentioned request, and it is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a route guiding apparatus that can present a correct distance to a guidance intersection.